Science, language and linguistic culture

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LANGUAGE
Language & Communication 29 (2009) 26–46

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COMMUNICATION

Science, language and linguistic culture

Nigel Love

Department of Linguistics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa

Abstract

If we are to render our first-order activities as users of language amenable to contemplation andinquiry conducted by means of language itself, we must abstract certain aspects of those activitiesfrom the behavioural continuum in which they are embedded and set them up as objects. Abstractionin one particular dimension gives rise to the decontextualised reifications we recognise as linguisticunits. First-order language-use may then come to be understood as the deployment by instantiationof these objects. Codification of a consistent set of them is essentially what gives us a language. Themain questions discussed here are (i) how far these processes are neutral with respect to the differentcultural backgrounds against which they may occur or be carried out and (ii) what the implicationsof the proposed answer are for linguistics as the science of language and for inquiries, e.g. cognitivescience, influenced by linguistics.� 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Jackendoff, R; Language and cognition; Language and culture; Language and representation; Lin-guistic science; Newspeak; Orwell, G.

1. A linguistic culture

The year is 1984, so far as Winston Smith can tell. Most of the world, divided into threemegastates, languishes in thrall to a political system dedicated to perpetuating the oligar-chical power of insane sociopathic elites under whose rule the only realistic image of thefuture is of ‘a boot stamping on a human face – for ever’ (Orwell, 1989 [1949], p. 280). Thechief global instrument of this oppression is perpetual war among the three states, whichnot only serves the economic function of denying people the material goods that might

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N. Love / Language & Communication 29 (2009) 26–46 27

give them the leisure to become too comfortable and hence too thoughtful for the good ofthe system, but also fosters, as ends in themselves, universal suffering and a climate of gen-eralised hatred that hastens the day when human beings will experience no emotions but‘fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement’ (p. 279). But at least one of the states has takenmatters a distinct stage further and instituted a monumental programme of linguistic engi-neering designed ultimately to prevent all and any thought inimical to the regime and itsmaleficent purposes. Already the official language of Oceania, once Newspeak in its ‘final,perfected version’ (p. 312) has become the sole available means of linguistic expressionthere, undesirable emotions, along with very much else, will not only not be experiencedbut will cease to exist even as concepts.

It would be idle to object to Orwell’s relentlessly dystopian vision, either in general or inrespect of what we are concerned with here – its specifically linguistic aspect – that it is anabsurd fantasy incapable of realisation. Ill-begotten by Whorf out of C.K. Ogden,1 New-speak would undeniably fall stillborn into any even half-way realistically imagined world.No doubt that is why Orwell is so very vague about how in detail it is supposed to be prop-agated and imposed to the exclusion of the existing natural languages of Oceania – whichconsists, let us remind ourselves, of ‘the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the Brit-ish Isles, Australasia and the southern portion of Africa’ (p. 193) – and, once imposed,maintained in perpetuity in its ‘perfected’ version without itself becoming a natural lan-guage. Saved by the structure of his novel from having occasion in the main text to offermore than the odd tantalising remark about Newspeak or to advert more than briefly to afew examples of its vocabulary, Orwell gives an initial impression of handsomely remedy-ing this deficiency by promising early on a separate Appendix devoted to explaining itspurposes and structural principles, only for this to turn out to be sketchy in the extreme.To put it mildly, there is much that is unexplained because there is much that has not beenthought through.

To take just one small instance, the chief metalinguistic instrument by which Newspeakstraitjackets its users – indeed, the only source of information for or about Newspeak thatOrwell ever mentions – is its Dictionary, which proceeds from edition to edition by sup-pressing more and more superfluous words and by ‘stripping such words as remained ofunorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever’ (p.313). In fact, the ‘greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionarywas not to invent new words, but having invented them, to make sure what they meant:to make sure, that is, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence’ (p. 318).The cancelled words are those of Oldspeak, i.e., Standard English as we know it (or asOrwell knew it in 1948). Newspeak is a version of English, but nonetheless a different lan-guage from English, adapted to the ideological needs of the Oceanian ruling Party. Itwould therefore be at least interesting to have the elementary information whether theDictionary is monolingual in Newspeak or whether it is a bilingual tool for the learningof Newspeak. If the former, it is hard to see how it can perform its pedagogical functionin relation to those using it to learn the language from scratch. If the latter, it is hard to seehow it can perform its ideological function, in as much as the provision of Oldspeakglosses of Newspeak words will tend to perpetuate Oldspeak and the associated ways ofthought.

1 See Whorf, 1956; Ogden, 1930, 1937.

28 N. Love / Language & Communication 29 (2009) 26–46

One could go on in this carping vein ad nauseam. What is significant is that despite thetendency of Orwell’s linguistic nightmare to collapse into incoherence the moment anypart of it is brought into focus, the general idea of Newspeak retains its power to horrify.And that can only be because it reflects or projects or at least makes significant contactwith the real-world linguistic culture against whose background it was conceived. Afterall, it is possible to imagine cultures for whose participants Newspeak would fail to makeany kind of sense at all, let alone frighten anyone.

Let us consider some of the points of contact.In Oceania no communication with foreigners is permitted, nor any knowledge of their

languages. Since this must be taken as reciprocally preventing foreigners from acquiringknowledge of Oceanian languages, one of the peculiarities of Newspeak is that it has(or will have, when finally ‘adopted’) no non-native speakers. Orwell here hypothesisesa sociolinguistic situation that has in Western culture for long been tacitly upheld as adesirable ideal. A language fundamentally ‘belongs to’ its native speakers – i.e., thosewho have been born and brought up to speak it from birth, as their ‘mother tongue’, ina family where the parents or other adults were brought up to speak the language frombirth. Speakers of whom this is true, or some socially high-status subset of them, havethe privilege of determining what the language ‘really’ is or should be – what the permis-sible words and constructions are, how they should properly be pronounced and spelt, etc.In this way a linguistic pecking order is established among members of a speech commu-nity, which will typically correspond to a large extent to a more general social rankingordained by other criteria. At the top come the native speakers. Next come those whoare almost native speakers but not quite. Then those who did not learn the language untiladulthood. And so on. On the fringes of the community will be the hangers-on, thosewhose command of the language is poor or suspect (recent immigrants, foreign workers,semi-speakers, etc.).

The linguistic purity of the Newspeak community is matched by the purity of the lan-guage itself. Newspeak has no dialects.2 It is apparently subject to no form of variationwhatever, whether individual, social, regional or historical. Its words are imagined as con-joining in perpetuity exactly the same forms to the same meanings whether uttered in theAustralian outback, the Argentine pampas or the dingy purlieus of London, chief city ofAirstrip One. Again we have a feature corresponding not to any known linguistic realitybut to an aspiration that has consistently played a prominent role in Western linguistic cul-ture. It is evident, for instance, in post-Renaissance projects of ‘standardising’ the lan-guages of European nation-states.3

The mechanism whereby a politically favoured language variety becomes standardisedbears a close relation to one of the main principles on which Newspeak is constructed.Standardisation consists essentially in the suppression of alternative modes of expression– of free variation in the use of what are deemed to be communicationally equivalent andtherefore competing pronunciations, inflectional forms, grammatical constructions, lexicalitems, spellings, etc. (cf. ‘[e]ven where a noun and verb of kindred meaning were not ety-mologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed. There was, for

2 Apart from a few remarks (e.g., p. 321) about the ‘gabbling style of speech’ encouraged by the stress patternsdetermined by its principles of word-formation, Orwell has nothing to say about the phonology of Newspeak, butwe may safely assume that it has no accents either.

3 cf. Love, 1994.


example, no such word as cut, its meaning being sufficiently covered by the noun-verbknife’ (p. 314)). In contrast with Newspeak, however, real-world linguistic suppressionmay take the form not only of either condemning or discouraging use of the disfavouredalternative, but also of fostering a potential or incipient functional differentiation of thevariants. This weeding of the linguistic garden has as its object the ‘fixing’ of the language,and has at all times been the chief task of the prescriptive grammarian. In 17th-centuryFrance, for instance, tightly drawn admissibility rules kept out of the authoritative andstrictly literary Dictionnaire de l’academie franc�oise all sorts of manifestations of the lexicalexuberance of previous generations of French writers, such as the 16th-century cult ofdiminutive forms, of hyperbolic superlatives in –issime and, in general, of free derivationby affixation. The idea was that these extravagances could be eliminated, at least frompolite usage, simply by omitting them from the dictionary. Orwell’s novel developmentof that idea is to postulate that such a linguistic purge might be conducted not by the lit-

terateurs of a national language academy concerned to uphold ideals of clarity and preci-sion in the use of words but by ruthless tyrants intent on annihilating thought itself –‘[u]ltimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involv-ing the higher brain centres at all’ (p. 322).

Meanwhile the medium-term intention was that ‘a heretical thought . . .should be liter-ally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words’ (p. 312). This is anextreme Whorfian twist to an idea about language that has been a consistent feature ofWestern intellectual culture since the earliest times. Words ‘stand for’ or symbolically rep-resent entities that are not words.4 This general notion comes in different versions, depend-ing on how the entities that words represent are conceived of. They may be thought of as‘out there’ in the world. So, for instance, an ancient and long enduring Western doctrineabout proper names has it that proper names stand directly for the individual so desig-nated. Alternatively the entities concerned may be seen as ‘in here’, i.e., as representingthoughts or ideas or concepts in the individual mind. This does not necessarily imply out-right rejection of a connection between words and things – it may simply involve the con-tention that words stand for things not directly but indirectly, by way of standing for ideaswhich conform to the things in question. However that may be, Orwell clearly believes thatthe words of a language collectively constitute a system for representing and thereby per-mitting the expression of thoughts. If there are no words available that correspond to athought, then the thought is unthinkable. ‘‘The word free still existed in Newspeak, butit could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is freefrom weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free”’(p. 313), because those senses of the word had been stripped from it, apparently by thesimple procedure of leaving them out of the dictionary.

In so far as we find it possible to imagine that this language-planner’s manoeuvre mighteffectively prevent thought, what we see here is the starkest possible conflation or equationof a linguistic praxis with making use of the provisions of some particular codification of alanguage.5 This too is an idea familiar in our linguistic culture. Languages are commonlyunderstood to be fixed systems of invariant biplanar entities each uniting a form with ameaning or meanings, as laid down in a dictionary and a grammar book. What is not laid

4 See, e.g., Harris, 1980, pp. 33–78.5 A codification is to be distinguished from a code (see, e.g., Love, 2007). It is the existence of codifications that

gives rise to the idea that languages are codes or are usefully to be likened to codes.


down in the dictionary or grammar book is either stigmatised or treated as not or not‘really’ part of the language. Considered in terms of the conceptual process by which thisidea is given effect, languages and their component parts are reified as a fixed set of decon-textualised abstractions from speech events. Orwell rigorously follows through the logic ofthis: if in a particular case the necessarily selective procedures of abstraction and reifica-tion have been so carried out that a certain meaning is not attached to any form at all,that meaning is simply inexpressible.

Here then, roughly characterised with reference to a famous imaginative magnificationand transcendence of them, are some of the salient features of the collection of folk ideasabout language that I am calling our linguistic culture. The question to be addressed nowis how they relate to the ideas about language entertained by the scientific discipline called‘linguistics’.

2. A linguistic science?

Since the mid-19th century Western linguistics has prided itself on being the ‘science oflanguage’. One important consequence of this self-designation is that linguistics projectsan image of itself as culture-neutral, in the sense that physics, chemistry and biology areculture-neutral.6 That is to say, while no one would deny that Western science is the prod-uct of a particular culture, its findings, if true, are held to be universally true. The laws ofphysics do not cease to hold in those parts of the world where the inhabitants’ intellectualhistory is such that they could not have formulated them for themselves. The facts vouch-safed by the science of human physiology are what they are, even for those who have noinkling of them. Is linguistics culture-neutral in this sense?

It would be hard to justify a claim that it is, when we find on the opening page of one ofthe most famous works of modern linguistics the assertion that ‘[l]inguistic theory isconcerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneousspeech-community, who knows its language perfectly. . .’ (Chomsky, 1965, p. 3). The idealspeaker-listener, as thus characterised, bears a strong resemblance to the post-Newspeakcitizen of Oceania. In fact Orwell might be read as having specified the political circum-stances required for Chomsky’s linguistic ideal to be realised – or, looking at it anotherway, as having measured the distance between Chomsky’s ideal and any possible linguisticreality. Furthermore, the ‘native speakers only’ desideratum is alive and well in modernlinguistics. The ranking of members of the linguistic community in terms of how far theyfall short of the ideal is taken as an index of the utility to the linguist of particular personsas potential ‘informants’. Only native speakers’ intuitions of grammaticality, etc., count.This notion of course also has implications for the status of linguistic communities them-selves. The monoglot community (post-Newspeak Oceania is a perfect example) has longbeen projected as the ‘normal’ case. Communities in which two or more languages are spo-ken, and in which various forms of so-called language interference are rife, are in this the-oretical perspective automatically marginalised.

From the linguist’s point of view the principal requirement here is that the language the‘native speaker’ speaks shall be ‘pure’, uncontaminated by external linguistic influences.7

6 cf. Love, 1995.7 cf. Harris, 1998, pp. 52–53.


This concern is supposedly motivated by scruples akin to those in the physical sciences,where it is often important that only unadulterated samples are subject to analysis, for fearof producing unreliable results. However, it is no coincidence that ‘purity’ features as animportant concept in many real-world totalitarian systems of thought as well as in fictionalones, and is reflected in linguistic legislation of a plainly chauvinistic character (such asthat in force in Quebec and the loi Toubon enacted in France in 1994, not to mentionrecent attempts to ‘croatise’ Croatian – a policy with clear links to that of ethnic cleansingin the former Jugoslavia). For these reasons among many others it would be naıve to sup-pose that the modern ‘science of language’ is ideologically neutral.

The discourse of monoglot normality has influenced general linguistic theory in manydifferent ways; in historical linguistics, for example, ‘normal’ language change is, typically,the kind of change that happens in languages understood to have a clear ‘genetic’ pedigree.This leads to a treatment of languages that emerge in multilingual settings, such as creoles,as ‘exceptional’. Another area in which the discourse of normality creates problems is mul-tilingualism, in at least two ways: (i) the relationship between language and identity is typ-ically seen as a monolingual affair, with multilingual communities usually misrepresentedand misunderstood in their linguistic practices; (ii) language shift is related to identity loss,notwithstanding the fact that the multilingual individual can construct his or her identityon the basis of multiple codes. Third, in the discourse of language endangerment the‘native speaker’ is understood to be a valuable asset, but in the case of the multilingualindividual it is not clear how nativity is assigned. In recent research in all these fields therehave been calls to move beyond a normative, Eurocentric notion of ‘mother tongue’ inorder to develop an understanding of, and a theoretical apparatus capable of dealing with,language in heteroglossia as a normal, rather than an extraordinary, phenomenon.

More generally, it can be argued that much what has passed for a science of languageover the last 150 years has been nothing but an exercise in culture maintenance.

Irrespective of what kind of science linguistics is held out to be (and different linguistshave had different views on this), in so far as ‘science’ is those branches of study that dealwith measurable and hence precisely identifiable phenomena, the perennial problem for ascience of language has been to identify the phenomena that might constitute its objectof study. In the words of one recent commentator, the history not just of linguistic sciencein the modern sense, but of linguistic thought more broadly ‘can in fact be considered as aseries of attempts to determine the essentially linguistic, and with each new determination anew object, claiming the name of language, is brought into focus’ (Harpham, 2006, p. 199).

In Western language studies the thesis that there can be a science of language is firstarticulated in the 19th century. It is associated with the rise of Indo-European comparativeand historical linguistics, and is based on the assumption that the essence of scientificmethod is the systematic collection, comparison and classification of samples. Max Mullerfamously expressed this view when he said that ‘the languages that are and have been spo-ken in every part of our globe since the first dawn of human life and thought, supply mate-rials capable of scientific treatment . . . we can treat them, in fact, in exactly the same spiritin which the geologist treats his stones and petrifactions, – nay, in some respects, in thesame spirit in which the astronomer treats the stars of heaven or the botanist the flowersof the field. There is a Science of Language as there is a science of the earth, its flowers andits stars’ (Muller, 1864, p. 1).

For Muller not all ways of studying linguistic materials count as scientific. Excludedfrom his science of language are all linguistic studies that have either overtly pedagogical


aims (e.g., the teaching of foreign languages) or which subserve other academic purposes(e.g., the study of literature, or the editing of texts). Muller’s arguments mark the origin ofthe modern bid to break away from an educational tradition in which language studieshave an established place in the humanities and are predominantly controlled by norma-tive grammarians and literary specialists.

What kind of linguistic objects does the Mullerian enterprise involve the linguist in pos-tulating? Comparative and reconstructive studies are based on the observation of system-atic correspondences between linguistic items separated by time, space or both.8 To take asimple example:

pan

8 cf. Love, 2002.9 Historically the stem ada

10 cf. Love 2006.

Pfanne

path
Pfad
peach
Pfirsche
penny
Pfennig
pepper
Pfeffer
pipe
Pfeife
plant
Pflanze plough Pflug
plum
Pflaume
pound
Pfund
The differences here are at least partly systematic – for instance, an initial bilabial plosiveon the left invariably corresponds to a labiodental affricate on the right. And the meaningscorrespond too: each pair of words are glosses of each other. Correspondences as regularas this could not have come about by accident or coincidence. How then? The preferredanswer involves supposing that each pair are historical variants of the ‘same’ word.

This immediately comes into conflict with a perspective in terms of which the words onthe left, being English words, must obviously be different words from the words on theright, which are German words. I draw attention to this rather banal fact because its the-oretical significance is often overlooked. It runs counter to the idea that there is some con-text-neutral point of view from which the ‘recurrently instantiated entities’ that constitutea language can automatically be identified.

However, treating cognates in Modern English and Modern German as the ‘same’ wordmay not seem very remarkable, involving at most an adjustment of our usual way of dif-ferentiating ‘dialects’ from ‘languages’. More obviously problematic is the macrohistoricallinguist’s commitment to treating any linguistic items identifiable as etymologically con-nected as ‘the same’. For instance, it is an etymologist’s fact that English feather andWelsh adar, which is the plural of aderyn9 and means ‘birds’, are variant reflexes of thesame form. But where do such ‘facts’ come from?10 Feather and adar have neither a singlephonetic segment in common (granted a non-rhotic English speaker) nor anything but theloosest semantic connection. Crucially required, it might seem, is some way of perceivingthe ‘sameness’ allegedly lurking behind obvious – in many cases, gross – discrepancies. Butthis is the wrong way to look at it. It is not a matter of first noticing a (non-existent)

r is semantically collective and a ‘singulative’ aderyn has been derived from it.


sameness and then working back to ancestral forms whose divergent development in dif-ferent branches of Indo-European has caused the differences. It is a matter of demonstrat-ing that, provided it is not on semantic grounds wholly implausible to associate feather

with adar, a story can be told whereby given, among many other things, a certain recon-structed Indo-European root or form, certain established sound changes distinguishingGermanic from Celtic . . ., continuous transmission through many generations might beexpected to yield feather or something like it as the contemporary end point of one lineof development and adar or something like it as the contemporary end point of the other.The alleged ‘sameness’ is an artefact of the notion of ‘continuous transmission’. What isclaimed to have been continuously transmitted? The only possible answer is: a metalinguis-tic reification located in the mind of the historical linguist.

If we try to rationalise this onto-epistemological curiosity, two kinds of explanationsuggest themselves. The main achievement of early scholars in the tradition of compara-tive philology, and their main claim to have founded a science of language, was that goingbeyond merely observing many formal-semantic correspondences across Indo-Europeanlanguages they devised ways of systematising those observations and reducing them tosimple correlational formulae. But this immediately invites the question what the correla-tions mean and why they should hold. Interlinguistic correspondence formulae (of thekind typified by Grimm’s Law) are no more than that: i.e., formulae. In themselves theycontain no historical information and capture no ‘facts’ other than the observations andassumptions (whether accurate or inaccurate) that went into their formulation.

So an interpretation is required. The preferred interpretation, much influenced by acontemporary revolution in biological science, was to suppose they represented the differ-ent development, along separate evolutionary lines, of linguistic entities that could betraced back to a common ancestor. Thus did comparative philology find itself committedto belief in the survival across millennia of sounds and forms which although in manycases transformed beyond recognition nonetheless mystically retained their identity. Inthe biological case items that did indeed retain their identity across such time spans wereeventually identified and called genes. In the linguistic case, needless to say, nothing anal-ogous to genes has ever turned up.11

Another kind of explanation would point out that the ‘sameness’ of linguistic formsacross long time spans is no more than a logical extension of a commonplace feature ofour understanding of how languages work ‘synchronically’. If you and shortly afterwardsI each produce an utterance that might be written down as ‘feather’, then irrespective ofany phonetic differences between them we have both said ‘the same thing’. That in itself,properly understood, may be uncontentious enough. What is highly contentious is that‘saying the same thing’ in such a case is to be interpreted as instantiating an abstractinvariant, viz. the ‘thing’ (in this case the word feather) that has been said twice. Onceone makes that reifying move there is nowhere to stop. For if the abstraction in questionremains the same across minor phonetic differences (as between your pronunciation andmine) and tiny time gaps (as between your utterance and mine), at what specifiable degreeof enlargement do the differences and the gaps begin to matter, and why?

11 This is not to say that what genes are, exactly, has a clear or uncontroversial answer. See, e.g., the discussion inHaig, 2007 [2006].


The lack of a viable answer to this question is the Achilles’ heel of Saussure’s structur-alist challenge to 19th-century linguistics. Saussure too makes the point that the compar-ativist method creates entities that are merely artefacts of the method itself. So alongsidethe sense in which feather and adar are manifestly different words there is conjured up theillusion, as Saussure saw it, of a third entity of which feather and adar are merely histor-ically separated variant realisations. This, from Saussure’s point of view, is a diachronicmirage: there is no such thing.

Saussure’s project may be seen as a deliberate attempt to correct the gross decontextu-alisation of language inherent in 19th-century comparativism by adopting a viewpoint thatallowed the linguist to look at language through the eyes of the language-user. But Saus-sure takes it for granted that the viewpoint of the language-user can be read off withoutfurther ado from certain doctrines about language typical of Western linguistic culture.12

That (i) there may be a disconnection between what the language-user has been taught tothink about language and his or her actual experience of it and (ii) a would-be linguisticscientist ought at least to consider whether the latter might not be a more appropriatestarting-point than the former, are considerations to which Saussure appears oblivious.

The relevance of the language-user’s perspective is emphasized repeatedly in the Cours de

linguistique generale and is the basis for Saussure’s distinction between the synchronic anddiachronic study of language. The object created by adopting this viewpoint is an idiosyn-chronic structure of signs, each uniting a form with a meaning. The trouble is that this idio-synchronic structure is no less a mirage than the diachronic one. In fact it is the very samemirage, projected over a shorter time scale. To put this point the other way round, the‘internal’ history of a language is a metafiction constructed from diachronic projectionsof the cultural fiction that lies at the heart of synchronic descriptive linguistics, namely thatutterances instantiate enduring linguistic abstractions. The difference between synchronicand historical linguistics is simply that the former is in practice concerned, as Saussureput it (or, given his theoretical context, was forced to concede), with ‘un espace de tempsplus ou moins long pendant lequel la somme des modifications survenues est minime’(Saussure de, 1922 [1916], p. 142) – i.e., during which the temporal dimension can be ignored.

That one does not automatically adopt the language-user’s perspective by reducing thespan of time over which linguistic objects are held to endure to one where there are no obvi-ous changes to be recorded is perhaps best appreciated by contemplating Bloomfield’sbehaviourist interpretation of scientific synchronic linguistics. From Bloomfield’s point ofview, a problem with overtly mentalist versions of the idea of languages as determinate,biplanar systems of linguistic objects is that they locate the system in some realm unavailableto observation. Unfortunately, reliance on what is observable does not reveal any alternativelocation for them. So Bloomfield was forced to postulate, as the fundamental assumption oflinguistics, that ‘in every speech community some utterances are alike in form and meaning’(Bloomfield, 1935 [1933], p. 78) – i.e., are instantiations of the same linguistic object.

But how do we tell which utterances these are? Bloomfield simply says (p. 77) that herewe can rely on our ‘everyday knowledge’. But can we in fact ascertain the units of our lan-guage by, as Bloomfield recommends, attending to what we would say in ‘ordinary life’ asto when speech-forms are ‘the same’ or ‘different’?

12 A telling point in this context is that, although he was himself Swiss, Saussure’s linguistics simply ignoresmultilingualism.


I, for one, find that I have no fixed view on whether when you say [i:ðE] I understandyou to be uttering something ‘different’ from when I say [aiðE]; whether this also applies to[tEmei|ou] vs [tEmA:tEu]; whether the case of [ElumInum] vs [�ljumInjEm] is different again,because of the different spellings; whether it is raining is ‘the same’ as it’s raining; whether Iacknowledge the somewhat higher level of abstraction at which didn’t you finish it? mightbe ‘the same’ as did you not finish it?; whether the modal auxiliary will is the ‘same’ word asthe lexical verb will; whether I didn’t leave because I was angry when it means ‘because Iwas angry I didn’t leave’ is a different structural unit from I didn’t leave because I was angry

when it means ‘it wasn’t because I was angry that I left’; whether I think that croissant asuttered in an English-speaking context is a French word momentarily intruding into Eng-lish (i.e., not a structural unit of English at all, but of French) or see it as an English loanfrom French (i.e., a separate structural unit from the French one); whether it is supposedto make any difference to my judgement on the status of port (drink) and port (harbour) ashomonyms that I happen to know that port was originally shipped from Oporto; whetherfather-in-law is three words or one; whether holpen is a variant of helped or a different unitin a different system. On all such questions I find (i) that they hardly ever arise in ‘ordinarylife’; (ii) that in so far as they do, different answers or interpretations might be appropriatein different situations; (iii) that it is an open question how far, in any particular case, otherEnglish-speakers would concur with my judgements; (iv) above all, that there is no context-

neutral fact of the matter.13 A dictionary or other co-dificatory device may or may notundertake to pronounce definitely on some (but surely not all) such questions. But inany case I find that such devices play a rather minor role in determining ‘what I wouldsay’.

Chomsky’s version of the notion of languages as determinate systems of biplanar lin-guistic objects is, on the face of it, an implicit requirement of his theorising rather thanhis overt object of study. It is, however, crucially required for his presentation of the ideaof an individual’s ‘I-language’ as a particular state of ‘FL, his postulated species-wide ‘fac-ulty of language’. A recent pronouncement (Chomsky, 2000, p. 168) runs as follows:

13 cf.

There is reason to believe that human beings have a specialised ‘organ’ dedicated tothe use and interpretation of language, call it ‘the faculty of language’ (FL). We cantake FL to be common to the species, assuming states that vary in limited ways withexperience. Interacting with other systems (cognitive, sensorimotor), these statescontribute to determining the sound and meaning of expressions . . .For concreteness, consider the expressions of example (1):

(1)

Love, 20

a

03, 2004.

John was (too) clever to catch
b John was (too) clever to be caught c John was (too) easy to catch d John was (too) easy to be caught
If Peter’s FL has attained the appropriate state, he knows that with ‘too’ included,(1a) and (1b) are true if John was so clever that one could not catch him (John), andthat, with ‘too’ deleted, (1a) is ‘deviant’, requiring some non-standard mode of inter-

14 Fo15 As

find, aof Rich


pretation (while (1b) is differently interpreted). He knows further that (1c) is true if itwas (too) easy to catch John (who wasn’t ‘easy’); and that with or without ‘too’, theobvious analogies fail for (1d), also deviant. The study of FL seeks to encompasssuch observations under broader generalizations . . . and to discover the principlesand structures that underlie them. Though not explaining Peter’s behaviour, theseelements of inner states should contribute to an account of how he thinks and acts,in so far as there is one. There is a reasonably successful theory that addresses suchfacts on the assumption that FL is a computational system with largely invariantprinciples. Tentatively adopting it, we attribute to Peter the corresponding mentalstates, representations and processes (to which he has no conscious access).

The tactic of inviting the reader to ‘consider’ linguistic items of some kind has been anexpository favourite of Chomsky’s since his earliest theorising of half a century ago. In thiscase we are told in advance to think of the printed formulae labelled a–d as ‘expressions’rather than as, say, sequences of individual words, or of Roman letters. However, since weare not told what the status of these ‘expressions’ – decontextualised abstractions on theprinted page – is supposed to be, mere ‘consideration’ will yield nothing until we arepointed in the right direction by the immediately following explanation of what is sup-posed to emerge from it. On the face of it all that emerges is that if ‘Peter’s FL has attainedthe appropriate state’ he will make certain judgements, i.e., those specified by Chomsky, asto the interpretation of the ‘expressions’ concerned. On the other hand, we may suppose, ifsomeone else’s FL has attained a different steady state the judgements may be expected todiffer in some respects. So what does this show or prove? Crucial here is what Chomskyonly insinuates – namely that what Peter ‘knows’ about these expressions coincides withwhat you or I know. The exercise would be pointless unless this assumption could safelybe made. We are tacitly invited to agree that, like Peter, we are in unconscious possessionof some intricately detailed facts about the grammar of certain English expressions, factsapt to be ‘encompassed under broader generalisations’ with a view to uncovering the ‘prin-ciples and structures that underlie them’.14 Whereas in reality the most we are agreeing onis that if we imagine ourselves encountering these verbal formulae in abstraction from anyfurther linguistic context, under instructions to try to interpret them as meaningful com-munications in English, we would very probably come up with the same readings or non-readings as Chomsky’s Peter. There is no reason to doubt that that is so. But there is everyreason to doubt that the fact (undeniably interesting so far as it goes) that we are all likelyto play a metalinguistic game of this kind in the same way and get the same results willbear the theoretical weight that Chomsky wants to put on it. For one thing, there is a tacitproviso under which the game is played, which is that we don’t think too carefully about itor try too imaginatively to contextualise the ‘expressions’ concerned or come to the taskhaving recently steeped ourselves in unusual or old-fashioned usages that happen to runcounter to the points Chomsky wants his examples to make. If we do, we are liable toremember, for instance, that there is a ‘subjective’ use of easy (‘at ease’ or ‘full of ease’)15

which makes John was too easy to be caught perfectly interpretable. In a case like this ‘devi-

r a recent discussion of some of the issues touched on here see Sampson, 2007.in ‘so cool and easy had his mind become that he was speculating on what kind of shelter the birds couldnd how the butterflies and moths saved their coloured wings from washing’. George Meredith, The Ordeal

ard Feverel (1859), chapter XLII.


ance’ dwindles on inspection to ‘not the reading that would immediately occur to you’.The ‘fact’ here, this ‘element of an inner state’ that Chomsky seems to feel needs account-ing for with a theory assuming that ‘FL is a computational system with largely invariantprinciples’, seems to boil down to a simple matter of frequency of usage. In any case, real-life language use does not in the normal way involve deciding what we ‘know’ aboutdecontextualised reifications called ‘expressions’ (or words, or sentences . . .). The idea thatan exercise of this kind makes sense at all, let alone as a way of investigating what it pur-ports to investigate, is a product of cultural conditioning of a highly particular kind.

The fact is that there is no such definite object as ‘the sentence (or non-sentence) John

was too easy to be caught’. To suppose that there is simply to reify an entity conjured intoexistence by the graphic devices employed to cite it.

This is an absolutely fundamental procedure in linguistics. Let us take another recentexample, this time from Jackendoff, 2002, which sets out to construct a comprehensiveand novel synthesis of generativist thinking about language. Right at the outset (p. 6 of450 pp) Jackendoff presents ‘a rather full analysis of a very simple sentence of English’.The point of this rather full analysis is that

Any adequate theory of language must begin with the fact that even the simplest sen-tences contain at least this rich a structure. Although I don’t feel comfortable makingmoral statements, I will make one nevertheless. In my opinion, if one wishes to jointhe conversation about the nature of language, one must recognize and acknowledgethis complexity. One need not have an account of all of it, but one may not willfullyignore it and still expect to be allowed in the game. This is the minimum that scien-tific respectability demands (p. 18).

The sentence in question is identified as The little star’s beside a big star (see Fig. 1).Given that we are to understand that we are concerned here with something spoken,

the first question is what item in spoken English that written form is supposed to desig-nate. One obvious and natural answer is that it stands for the class of spoken utterancesthat would take that form if transcribed in standard English orthography. But there is animmediate problem with this interpretation, arising from the fact that the sentence isassigned a phonological structure, including in particular a level of segmental structure,that would seem to exclude a great many utterances that would standardly be writtendown as The little star’s beside a big star. For instance, not all speakers of English,not even all native speakers, have the segment represented by the capital D in [lIDl],or any segment at all corresponding to the [r] in [star]. So are we to understand that whenI, for instance, say [ðElItlstA:zbEsaidEbIgstA:], I am not producing an instance of Jackend-off’s sentence? If I am not, one wonders why he did not cite the sentence in the first placein the form of what he gives as its segmental structure. Either sentences as such do nothave a segmental structure or using alphabetic writing is a misleading way of citingsentences.

Another question concerns the relation between this sentence and what Jackendoffseems to want to count as the different sentence The little star is beside a big star, withunreduced verb is. (Notice that the analysis is not neutral as between these variants: the[z] of [starz] at the morphophonological level is explicitly given the designation ‘Cl’ for cli-tic.) But there is a real question whether English speaker-writers treat these as one unit ortwo. Certainly there are those who as a matter of course would ‘restore’ the full form is insome kinds of formal writing, and conversely, perhaps reduce the full written form to the


clitic when reading aloud. For anyone who does that, it seems that the sentence in questionmight be a somewhat more abstract item than Jackendoff acknowledges.

There is also the question what to make of the little drawing alongside the heading ‘spa-tial structure’. He says (p. 12) that

Fig. 1. From Jackendoff (2002, p. 6).


One can think of spatial structure variously as an image of the scene that the sen-tence describes, a schema that must be compared against the world in order to verifythe sentence . . . the physical (or non-propositional) structure of the model in whichthe truth conditions of semantic/conceptual structure are applied, or perhaps otherconstruals . . . What is clear is that any such image requires two star-shaped objects(or object-schemas) in it.

One wonders, first, in what sense a sentence as such may be said to describe a scene aparticular image of which is somehow intrinsically connected to it; second, how far theastronomer, for instance, would agree with Jackendoff’s idea of a star-shaped object, orwhether Jackendoff’s notion of the sentence he is talking about includes or excludes thecase where the stars in question are, say, the late Dudley Moore and John Cleese (apolo-gies for the cultural parochiality). They may be stars, but are hardly star-shaped. This ofcourse is to raise doubts whether star ‘celebrity, showbusiness luminary’ is the same wordas star in the sense Jackendoff evidently has in mind. Of course one can trace a meaning-chain of the kind cognitive semanticists are fond of, which would link the two senses andgive one polysemous word, the key link in the chain being the idea that stars shine. But arewe in fact all agreed that we aren’t confronted with homonyms here? One notes that thereare even quite closely related languages, for example French and German, whose wordsfor ‘star’ in the astronomical sense are cognate with star but where that word does notstandardly carry over to the celebrity sense.

The point, once again, is that there is no such linguistic object as the one ostensiblyunder analysis. In a perfectly straightforward sense, Jackendoff doesn’t know what he istalking about. The professional discourse of the linguist here underwrites the conclusionthat the indeterminacy of ‘same’ vs ‘different’ that attends our everyday metalinguistictalk is no mere slipshoddiness capable of being rectified by the language expert. Onthe contrary, the linguist is operating with a culturally determined idea about theobjects that constitute a language that was never intended to bear so much theoreticalweight. Our everyday practice of identifying linguistic ‘sames’, whatever results it mayyield in a particular case, is no warrant for taking it that, objectively, there really aresuch sames.

This selection of snapshots from the history of mainstream Western linguistics raisesquestions about the viability of the would-be science of language as variously understoodsince the 19th century. And the reason is that there do not seem to be any identifiable lin-guistic objects for the science of language to be the scientific investigation of. This is whatis meant by calling linguistics an exercise in culture maintenance. It is an attempt to scien-tise a body of doctrines and ideas about language constituting a second-order culturalsuperstructure erected on first-order processes of communication.

3. Language and representation

Aspects of this scientisation, in its specifically Chomskyan version whereby in effect thedeliverances of some public linguistic codification are treated as the products of ‘a compu-tational system with largely invariant principles’ became a key component of what mightbe called ‘computational cognitivism’ (cf. Varela et al, 1993 [1991], pp. 40 ff.). The centralidea here is that human intelligence – intelligence in general, perhaps – so resembles com-putation in its essential characteristics that cognition itself can actually be defined as com-


putational operations carried out or performed on symbols (i.e., elements that representwhat they stand for).

The key notion here is representation. The computationist claim is that we can explainintelligence and intentionality by supposing that cognition consists in acting on the basisof representations physically realised in the form of a symbolic code in the brain or amachine. As Gardner points out in his history of the subject, ‘‘cognitive science [was] pred-icated on the belief that it was legitimate – in fact, necessary – to posit a separate level ofanalysis which can be called the ‘level of representation”’ (Gardner, 1985, p. 38).

According to the computational cognitivist the problem is how to correlate the ascrip-tion of intentional or representational states with the physical changes that an agentundergoes in acting. If we want to claim that intentional states have causal properties,we have to show not only how those states are physically possible but how they can causebehaviour. This is where symbolic computation comes in. Symbols are both physical andhave semantic values. Computations are operations on symbols that respect or are con-strained by those semantic values. That is, a computation is fundamentally semantic orrepresentational – we cannot make sense of the idea of computation (as opposed to somerandom or arbitrary operation on symbols) without referring to the semantic relationsamong the symbolic expressions. A digital computer, however, operates only on the phys-ical form of the symbols it computes; it has no access to their semantic value. Its opera-tions are nonetheless semantically constrained because every semantic distinctionrelevant to its program has been encoded in the syntax of its symbolic language by its pro-grammers. In a computer syntax mirrors, or is parallel to the (ascribed) semantics. Thecognitivist claim, then, is that this parallelism shows us how intelligence and intentionality(semantics) are physically and mechanically possible. Thus the hypothesis is that comput-ers provide a mechanical model of thought or, in other words, that thought consists ofphysical, symbolic computations. Cognitive science becomes the study of such cognitive,physical symbol systems.

Note that the computationist is not claiming that if we were to open up someone’s headand look at the brain we would find symbols being manipulated there. Although the sym-bolic level is physically realised it is not reducible to the physical level. Because of this non-reducibility it is quite possible that what corresponds to some symbolic expression at thephysical level is a pan-cerebrally distributed pattern of brain activity. But the point to beemphasised is that in addition to the levels of physics and neurobiology computationalcognitivism postulates a distinct, irreducible symbolic level in the explanation of cognition.Furthermore, since symbols are semantic items, computationists also postulate a third,distinctly semantic or representational level.

The point I want to make is that this whole theoretical apparatus derives from a par-ticular cultural story about language. Whereas computational cognitivism sees natural lan-guages as essentially a kind of consciously externalised, publicly and overtly manipulablepartial analogue of the subpersonal cognitive system, the reality, I suggest, is that here wesee cognition itself being conceptualised on the basis of certain cultural ideas about lan-guage and how it functions.

Consider just two recent statements: (1) ‘Children come into their second year of lifeexpecting the noises other people make to be used symbolically; much of the job of learn-ing language is figuring out what concepts (or sets of things in the world, depending onyour view of semantics) these noises are symbols for’ (Pinker and Jackendoff, 2005, p.236). Here it is taken for granted that there is a determinate relation between given noise


and a given concept. Just as a dictionary presents a determinate relation between a wordand its meaning(s). (2) ‘There are, of course, many important ways in which jazz is not likelanguage; these will become more pertinent after we have given some additional consider-ation to some of the parallels. But there is one that is important to note at the outset. Inthe case of language, meaning is communicated through apprehension of the form of anexpression. When we process a sentence with a particular structure, we compute the struc-ture as a means of determining the meaning. In the case of jazz, what is communicated isthe form itself. When we process a piece of music, we compute just the structure’ (Culicov-er, 2005, p. 233). ‘Computing the structure as a means of determining the meaning’ is away of saying ‘figuring out what concepts these noises (marks on paper, etc.) in this com-

bination are symbols for’.Of course, cognitive science has moved on from universal adherence to conceiving of

cognition as symbol processing. There is much ongoing debate about the role of represen-tation in cognitive activities. Do cognitive systems act on the basis of internal representa-tions at all? The ontological and epistemological commitments underlying this idea havecome under challenge. It seems to assume that the environment (inner or outer) in whichthe cognitive activity takes place is a fixed given with its features specifiable in advance.Then mental representations inside the cognitive system are invoked to explain the rela-tionship between this cognitive activity and the pregiven world. But there is an increasingdisinclination to conceive of the mind as an input–output device that processes informa-tion. On this view information is a prespecified quantity, one that exists independentlyin the world and can act as the input to a cognitive system. This input provides the initialpremises on which the system computes a behaviour – the output. But how are we to spec-ify inputs and outputs for self-organising systems such as brains? Where does informationend and behaviour begin?

16 Seefavourdistinc

Why are processes so hard to classify? In earlier times, we could usually judgemachines and processes by how they transformed raw materials into finished prod-ucts. But it makes no sense to speak of brains as though they manufacture thoughtsthe way factories make cars. The difference is that brains use processes that change

themselves – and this means we cannot separate such processes from the productsthey produce. In particular, brains make memories, which change the ways we’ll sub-sequently think. The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves(Minsky, 1986, p. 288).

I want to suggest that linguistics move on too. Not only is it problematic to think oflanguages as collections of objects, it is also questionable whether the fact that we maybe inclined to think of languages as symbolic representational systems has any very clearor definite bearing on what it is either to use or to cognise language.

In this context the precise implications and significance of the terms ‘represent’, ‘repre-sentation’, etc. are notoriously difficult to pin down.16 So it may be as well to start from avery general account of what representation is and to consider whether or how far lan-guage falls within its scope. There seems to be something of a consensus that in the broad-est sense one has representation whenever some feature of an organism or artefact has

, e.g., the discussion in Love, 2007 of Carr’s, 2007 rejection of the idea that words encode meanings inof insisting that they represent them. The question is whether anything of significance hangs on the

tion.


been selected just because it reliably co-varies with information that is useful to the organ-ism or artefact.17 Such representation is symbolic in the case where the feature in questiondoesn’t control behaviour directly but only by triggering further processing in the controlsystem. All animals with brains, and all computers, have symbolic representations.18

Does language symbolically represent information? If what is at issue is the biologicalbasis and origin of the capacity to use language, and granted a sufficiently wide and gen-eral concept of ‘information’, there seems no reason to object to such a statement. That isbecause it stands in no discernible contrast to any alternative assertion as to what languagefundamentally is or does or is ‘for’ that it implicitly excludes. Is language a device forenhancing the communicative resources available to human beings? Yes, that too. Thereseems to be no conflict here. Such characterisations, at this level of generality, are notoffering themselves as competing answers to a question that has some one demonstrablycorrect answer.

It is quite a different matter to pose the question with respect to particular pieces of par-ticular languages, for instance what Jackendoff identifies as the English sentence the little

star’s beside a big star. As such, that putative sentence is not ‘for’ anything and does not‘do’ anything. It is a particular construction out of the resources of a particular codifica-tion of the English language,19 and in and of itself it is inert. Sitting on the page here itrepresents no information at all to someone unable to read English, for instance. It makessense to ask what it does or is ‘for’ only in relation to some context in which some corre-sponding utterance is actually uttered and, perhaps, interpreted. And then the idea that itrepresents something, let alone that there might be some general, context-neutral answerto the question just what it represents, appears much less convincing.

The standard story runs as follows. Let us take it for granted that there is some defi-nitely identifiable item in the English vocabulary written turnip. This word turnip symbol-ically represents turnips, or a particular turnip, or turniphood, or the concept of aturnip. . . (even when trying to state, in the most general terms, the doctrine of linguisticrepresentation itself, one comes up against the problem of specifying just what kind ofthing a linguistic expression is supposed to represent). It does so by attaching to that arbi-trary form the appropriate meaning. So if I know the word turnip (and, in Orwell’s view,only on condition that I know the word) I am able to entertain, express and convey to oth-ers my thoughts about turnips.

This is a classic statement of an ‘externalist’ view of how language operates.20 Noticehow the most natural way of expressing it involves figuratively treating the words them-selves as agents – saying what the word itself ‘does’ and how it does it. It presents thehuman beings who use it as passively subject to the mechanisms by which the word doesits work.

The problem is how to bring such an account into any sort of useful conjunction witheven the most trivial commonplaces of our actual linguistic experience. One elementarydifficulty with this story is that many English-speakers who would doubtless recognisethe word turnip as in some sense belonging to their vocabulary are in varying degrees

17 See, e.g., Dretske, 1995; Lloyd, 1989.18 I owe this formulation to Don Ross.19 In fact here it is a quotation from Jackendoff, but that makes no important difference in this context.20 It may explain a tendency to consider that, e.g., form words (the, of) are ‘not words’, as noted by Davis (2001)

in her study of folk interpretations of the concept ‘word’.


vague about what a turnip is. Although I know it for a root vegetable of some sort, notbeing a botanist or a greengrocer or otherwise having frequent dealings with turnips Icould not reliably distinguish a turnip from a parsnip. And if I do not know what a turnipis, pro tanto I do not know the meaning of turnip.21 In terms of Putnam’s ‘division of lin-guistic labour’ (Putnam, 1975) I have been exempted from duty as a repository of the fullsemantic specification of this particular English word.

The point here doesn’t just apply to me and turnips. The idea that knowledge of a wordof one’s language could be described in terms of a binary choice between two mental stateslabelled ‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’ it is a fantasy that doesn’t bear the slightest scrutiny inthe light of linguistic reality. This has significant implications for the idea that words rep-resent something that is not words. For what is in fact ‘represented’, if anything, by the useof a given word on a given occasion of utterance must depend on the relationship betweenthat word and the participants in the communicative event in which it is deployed andinterpreted. And that relationship will vary without limit from case to case. This promptsthe question where exactly the ‘representing’ is supposed to be going on, by whom and towhom. If you are the world’s foremost expert on turnips (whatever, as an expert, you takea turnip to be), when in conversation with me about them there is likely to be a large gapbetween what you may think you are representing by the word and what I am capable offinding represented.

In fact, it is obvious on even cursory consideration that thoughts relate to correspond-ing pieces of language, if any, in an indefinite variety of ways. For instance, I have no wordfor the device that enables me to open and close my garage door from a distance. Suitablewords, or at any rate locutions, could readily be found if necessary, but there is no specificlexical item that counts for me as the word for the thing in question. Or take zip fasteners.There is a bit that you take hold of and draw along in one direction or the other, therebycausing some mechanism hidden inside the bit to which the bit you take hold of is attachedto interlock or dissever two rows of teeth. Not only do I have no word for either bit, I amnot altogether sure that either ‘row’ or ‘teeth’ is the mot juste for what I have just tried touse them to refer to. But, pace Orwell, none of this seems to affect my capacity to entertainthoughts about the things in question.

A more subtle kind of partial disconnection between words as actually used by an indi-vidual language-user and what they allegedly mean or represent would be where I have aword, but one which I suspect that my usage attaches to things in a way that is less thanuniversal. So, as a resident of South Africa, the word firelighter, for me, refers to an oblongchunk of some lightweight solid material, usually of a whitish colour flecked with brown,consisting or at any rate containing a high proportion of some readily combustible hydro-carbon. In a civilization much given to outdoor cooking over open fires, these items are inconstant use and are universally on sale under that designation. What I doubt is that sucha potentially general word as firelighter can be expected, throughout the English-speakingworld, to designate such a specific means of facilitating ignition.22

Banal considerations of this sort seem to lead to the general conclusion that there is noreason to maintain that utterances necessarily work by symbolically representing some-

21 Although when a recent leader of the British Conservative party was publicly described by a politicalcommentator as a turnip I think I knew perfectly well what was meant.22 According to the 1989 edition of the OED it simply means ‘(a) one who kindles a fire; (b) material for lighting

fires’ (www.oed.com).

http://www.oed.com


thing if what is represented, if anything, can differ indefinitely from case to case. Any morethan when a cricket umpire keeps count of the balls bowled in an over by shifting one ofsix pebbles from one hand to the other after each legitimate delivery of the ball we areobliged to see the umpire’s pebble as representing a delivery. Provided the number of peb-bles corresponds to the number of balls, and they are passed from one hand to the other atthe right time, why not just say he is counting the pebbles? Of course, the point of countingthe pebbles is to make sure that there are the right number of balls in the over. But nothingseems to hang on whether or not we choose to say that the pebbles represent the balls.

4. Summary

If we are to render our first-order activities as users of language amenable to contem-plation and inquiry conducted by means of language itself, we must abstract certainaspects of those activities from the behavioural continuum in which they are embeddedand set them up as objects. Abstraction in one particular dimension gives rise to the decon-textualised reifications we recognise as linguistic units. First-order language-use may thencome to be understood as the deployment by instantiation of these objects. Codification ofa consistent set of them is essentially what gives us a language.

How many of these steps along the road to languages as we know them are a logicalrequirement for even the most primitive metalinguistic talk about language, and hence uni-versal among human societies, is a matter for debate. Certainly there is no obvious neces-sity to follow the road to what Westerners might be inclined to see as its naturaldestination. For instance, an isolated monoglot community may have no reason to distin-guish language from a language at all, let alone in anything like the way we are accus-tomed to do.

Even if we consider only communities that have followed the road the whole way, thesociopolitical circumstances in which the concept of a language has thus been forged arelikely to vary. The Western concept of a language has for historical reasons been inti-mately bound up with ideas about nationhood and nationalism. Western nation stateshave in different degrees found it desirable to propagate authoritatively codified ‘standard’languages disseminated to linguistically more or less heterogeneous populations throughformal education. Hence a prescriptivist discourse about language conducted by a subsetof the state’s citizens who have come to be appointed guardians of the purity of its officiallanguage, with consequent marginalisation of the language of everyone else. This is clearlya non-essential feature, or complex of features, of one particular linguistic culture. It isperhaps surprising, or at any rate worth noting, that such a feature should be so faithfullymirrored in the linguistic science sponsored by this culture.

It is perhaps less surprising to find more fundamental aspects of the concept of a lan-guage reflected by linguistic science. Nonetheless one might have expected the processes bywhich languages arise out of language to form part of the subject matter of a scientificinquiry.

Instead, certain results of those processes are taken as given a priori. This is problematicin so far as the linguistic codifications in question are not and cannot be fixed, even if for avariety of metalinguistic purposes (e.g., teaching a language to foreigners, at least at anelementary level) they may be treated as if they are. Our codifications are in fact partialand for ever incomplete. We may, depending on context and purpose, entertain multiplecompeting codifications without apparent difficulty or sense of contradiction. (Are pan


and Pfanne one word or two? It depends on the kind of metalinguistic discourse you hap-pen to be engaged in.) All this causes difficulty for any would-be science concerned withthe identification and analysis of realia.

Furthermore, the idea that using language is simply a matter of instantiating units ofsome linguistic codification encourages blindness to the potential gulf between what is trueof the individual language-user and his or her linguistic experience and what is true, ormight at least be plausibly said, about language and languages in general. Statementsabout the latter tend to be simply projected on to the former. For instance, if languagescome to be seen as devices for encoding and decoding symbolic representations of whatis not language, this may be taken as the basis for explaining what the individual lan-guage-user is actually doing on any occasion of producing and interpreting utterances,and then more broadly as a model for understanding a range of cognitive processes gen-erally. But there is no necessary connection between the individual’s ‘internal’ engagementwith language as the basis for first-order language use and the deliverances of any externallinguistic culture. How far there are in fact such connections and if so, what they are, is afundamental question for a science of language properly reconceived and reoriented.

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